Today In Cold War History
1966 – Human spaceflight: Gemini 10 is launched from Cape Kennedy on a 70-hour mission that includes docking with an orbiting Agena target vehicle.
1969 – After a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Senator Ted Kennedy from Massachusetts drives an Oldsmobile off a bridge and his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, dies.
1972 – Egyptian president Anwar Sadat throws out 20,000 Russian military aids
1980 – Rohini 1, 1st Indian satellite, launches into orbit
1980 – Federal court voids Selective Service Act as it doesn’t include women
1982 – Two hundred sixty-eight campesinos (“peasants” or “country people”) are slain in the Plan de Sánchez massacre in Ríos Montt’s Guatemala.
The Plan de Sánchez massacre took place in the Guatemalan village of Plan de Sánchez, Baja Verapaz department, on 18 July 1982. Over 250 people (mostly women and children, and almost exclusively ethnic Achi Maya) were abused and murdered by members of the armed forces and their paramilitary allies.
The killings took place during one of the most violent phases of Guatemala’s Civil War, which pitted various groups of left-wing insurgents against the government and the armed forces. After assuming power in March 1982, defacto President Gen. Efraín Ríos Montt embarked on a military campaign that largely succeeded in breaking the insurgency, but at a terrible cost in human lives and human rights violations. The massacre in Plan de Sánchez was an element in the government’s scorched earth strategy, and the village was targeted because of the authorities’ suspicions that the inhabitants were harbouring or otherwise supporting guerrilla groups.

My goal with this blog is to offend everyone in the world at least once with my words… so no one has a reason to have a heightened sense of themselves. We are all ignorant, we are all found wanting, we are all bad people sometimes.